Travis County Commissioners Court
March 27, 2007
Item 39
Due to technical difficulties some caption files may be incomplete.
39. Consider and take appropriate action on proposed election precinct realignments and set a public hearing on April 10, 2007 regarding possible election precinct realignments.
>> ...or of voter registration, and gale fisher, elections division manager for the county clerk's office. Every two years we are required by state law to review county election precincts for population requirements and for concerns with polling places. This year we have the wonderful opportunity not to have to look at those over 5,000 registered voters since the count was increased two years ago. But we do have, however, is polling place concerns. And as I believe you're passing you -- you've got a new chart that says proposed polling location changes for 2007 effective 1-1-2008. It's three pages in length. We have identified those polling locations that we have concerns with and have initiated combining these precincts so we could use an a.d.a. Compliant polling location. So what you'll find in front of you is a document where you have two pages of polling place concerns that we initiated because there were problems, and then the bottom of the second page on to the third page is citizens requests. And we wholly recommend the entire package to put forward to you, and I'll going to hand it over to gale very quickly just to give you an update on how we came about receiving input from the public. Office in conjunction with the tax assessor collector's office had an open house in our training room and we invited through letters to the precinct judges, the precinct chairs and through e-mails on the neighborhood listservs, we invited the public to attend an open house. And we had a very lively, vigorous, well attended open house with different members from different communities, and we had discussions among the members of the communities. And what you're seeing here in front of you is the result of those discussions. The open house was a four-hour open house and there is one of the last item on page 63, 465 and 439, we're still having discussions it so you might see some minor changes on that. There were key members of the neighborhood that weren't available for the open house, so we are meeting on Friday with them. And so if you do see a change, it's because it was a consensus of the neighborhood. Everything else was in agreement with the neighborhoods and we are here actually to ask for an open house, which we will now talk -- which dee will talk about.
>> the next itemjust to ask youa public hearing setting a date for a public hearing for Tuesday, April the 10th. That same day to take final action should we not have any controversy. We don't expect any. We got full cooperation from the public at large. And we met I believe with each member of the Commissioners court or their staff to give you sort of an overview of all those changes. We have not done any negative feedback at all, so we don't anticipate any problems at all. We would like you to approve set agriculture public hearing date for Tuesday, April 10th, the same day to approve finaltwo consecutive, which is our normal process, and we will also post it on our website and wherever the Commissioners court agenda is normally posted. Combining, r as having one pomming place, I don't know how it happens, but so that somebody does not get the word t happens just about every time. And I just want to make sure that we are beefing up our efforts. For example, 103 combined with 121 over at the l.b.j. High school, sure enough someone in 103, ju as an example, is not going to get the word and they'll be calling Commissioner Davis and saying why didn't you tell me this!!?? And what we're trying to do is be as proactive as possible, so my concern is still how can we do better or what else can we do that we're not doing to make sure that the voters understand that there's a process of notice, but some kind of way they didn't get the word. I understand what you're saying about all these things, but somewhere along the line we still get those calls.
>> the one thing that we did this time that we've never done is that we did find the neighborhoods that had news letters, e-mails, listservs and we e-mailed them and asked them to post it on their neighborhood listserv. Other than sending everybody in the community a letter, which can get fairly costly, we decided that that was probably the most expeditious way to do this. A lot of these communities are very active and they have good neighborhood associations or neighborhood groups where they have neighborhood news letters. So we did get quite a few of those out, but we have never utilized that route of notifying the public before.
>> that would be for folks that do have internet access, obviously. But what we do is the voter certificates, these changes that you would be hopefully approving on April 10th, they're not effective until January 1, 2008. We do -- we will be mailing voter certificates, renewal voter certificates -- because your current one expires this year, December 31. We will be sending brand new ones the middle of December with notices, a separate notice with a card in an envelope to each of these folks that are affected by all these changes. Commissioners court has grant that had in the past. We will continue that process because we're trying very hard to reach the voter that maybe doesn't have internet access or still they have to receive -- we have to send out the certificate. So what we do is two mailings. One everybody who is not affected gets a regular card, 4 by 6 postcard. And those that have polling place notice changes we will send to them separately. We do that pretty religiously every two years.
>> and we always post in the old polling location a sign that says your location has changed. And one of the things that kim has been doing recently is we include a little map that they can pull out and it shows how to get to the new polling location also.
>> and also for the long-term, I know that this isn't something that we can do tomorrow by any stretch of the...
>> ...commuters necessary did henated by some computer firm out there so that we could have a network laptop system so that no matter where you show up you could vote, no matter whether it was your appropriate long-term precinct voting location or not. Day of the vote you could vote. That would be -- I think that's something that I think we want to work toward.
>> the polling center concept is a great concept, but technologically you have to have everything in place in order to do it.
>> so technology industry out there... Help us.
>> thank you.
>> 250 laptops, y'all!
>> and all the error cards and everything to support it. That's right. That would be great.
>> move that we set a public hearing on April 10th, 2007, regarding the election precinct realignments. That's the only action you need today, right?
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:00 AM